Place Scout for Startup People: the Silicon Valley Release

Sten Tamkivi
|
November 14, 2014

Teleport is releasing the first public preview of our place scouting tech
today. If you're really impatient you could jump straight to the link in
the end of this post, but first I'd love to give you some context for what
we're up to.

Going forward we want to make it clear that Teleport products are not
intended just for those who already self-identify as “nomadic”. We are
here to make all people around the world location independent. As
a start, we are focusing on the users we know best: the startup people.
Let me explain why.

Startups matter. Our friend and investor Marc Andreessen famously observed that
software is eating the world. Contrary to the frequent
public misconception this phenomena is not driven by some anonymous
machines taking over, but startups: curious, brave, explorative, fragile,
fast and challenging creatures changing the world around them with
technology.

Startups are people. As the legendary entrepreneurship teacher
Steve Blank defines it, a startup is a temporary organization formed to
search for a repeatable business model. Startup is a group of
individuals in and around it: coders, product managers, designers, marketers,
entrepreneurs - altogether a
very special breed. Our desire at Teleport has always been to delight
actual humans on the move with our software, not corporations procuring old
school relocation services for them. With early stage startups this
distinction virtually does not exist, our focus on people == focus on the
needs of the startup they form.

Startup people can be anywhere. Our co-founder Balaji recently noted:
“you can now hit enter at command line from anywhere in the world and code
(if good!) gathers scarce resources for you.” Most of his Twitter followers
probably heard it as praise to technologies like bitcoin and drones that let
you move resources with software. We at Teleport are obsessed about Balaji’s
more subtle point: startup people can be "anywhere in the world” like no
other profession in the history of mankind. Weirdly, the term “remote work”
has become too limiting as it suggests there is some mythical central place
where "real" work and value creation happen - and then some poor souls who
are unfortunately "remote" from it. This is just not true for startup people
who can move bits to create value no matter where the atoms of their body
happen to be.

Startup people move around. There will never be just one startup hub
for everyone. Ambitious startups build products for clients around the world.
Now, where their clients are might not be the lower cost places where, in
startup lingo, you can "extend your runway". And those, in turn, might not
all be places where your team truly can enjoy the quality of life outside
work. Or places where the cutting edge innovation you're working on is
encouraged or even legal. Then there are
places where it is 10X easier to raise funding. And there are places where
you can best deploy this funding to hire the talent you need to grow. If
carefully and objectively considered, all of these best places where startup
people need to be to win are increasingly scattered dots on the world map.

We are startup people. Last but not least, Teleport itself is a
software startup and on the move. Our early team of 8 people is already
spread across 10 time
zones, 4 countries and 2 continents and we have someone in the
air above the oceans about once a month. We travel for a week and we
move our families for months or years. We look at all the barriers and
hassles moving around and think "how will we fix this with software?” We are
our own users.

Our approach to helping startup people is twofold: First we help you to
understand if you are at the right place for the task at hand. Then we
help you get to the next place, as frequently as you wish.

As a small step forward, we are opening access to our early technology
preview today to search for the best place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the
Mecca for startup people across the globe. If you’re passing by Silicon
Valley for a brief time, we help you find co-working spaces to camp out at.
If you are looking to settle down for longer, we help you surface where the
jobs at coolest software startups are. As startup people we also think of
commute and residency in terms of collaborative consumption and the
software-powered way of living that Airbnb, Uber and Lyft, not mortgages and
car ownership as our parents did.

It makes me just tingly when I look at our planned product roadmap from here,
after releasing this little experiment to hear your feedback and
reactions. We will help startup people around the world to be more
mobile than ever. As we've said from the beginning: free people move.